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In his book Tweet Naked, online marketing expert
Scott Levy provides the critical information entrepreneurs
need to craft a social media strategy that will boost their
brand and their business. In this edited excerpt, the author
explains the importance of the content you're posting on
social media and how you can get your hands on more of
it.

On your social
media pages, there are at least 1,000 ways to get people to
engage, such as asking questions, offering daily tips, or posting
quotes and fun facts. You should definitely post video and
photos: Pictures and videos are shared 40 percent more than text.
Contests can also be a tremendous way to engage for two reasons:
People like the idea of winning something, and if you give away a
$100 or $200 prize and 10,000 people have shared or retweeted
your post and spread the word about the contest, you win.

You want to put content out there that's useful, helpful, and
makes you a resource or reference; you're essentially baiting
people to participate. So your content must be clever, creative,
entertaining and, perhaps, a little controversial. You want to
achieve that wow factor that comes from people seeing something
new and unusual that they then want to share with others.

You need to devise a plan that incorporates all forms of content:
conversation, pictures, videos, blogs, and links between your
platform and your website. For instance:

If you're running a contest, you need a prize that your
target audience would love and then present the contest with
graphics and photos.

If you're taking a survey, you need to know what questions
will draw your audience's attention and how the answers might
benefit your company (hit their "passionate button"). You might
even want to offer an incentive for responses.

If you're posting photos or videos, you need to have them
ready and sized to meet the demands of mobile users. You'll also
need to test all links in advance to make sure they'll go where
you want them to and that they're working.

While you'll want to post often, you'll realize in short order
that quality content can get used up quickly. Your social media
team will need to have sources at the ready. If you have 10
people on the team, some will be engaging while others are
scouring sources of interesting content, whether it's quotes,
jokes or the latest news story. Some will be brainstorming about
how to educate and share your company's expertise and how to be
helpful, while others will be positioning photos for your
Pinterest page or editing a video for YouTube.

If you're on your own or working with a partner, you may need to
have a simple plan of simply jumping in and engaging in
conversations on the various platforms with your fans and
followers, rather than continually posting content.

Finding Content
You'll constantly need source material, and a big part of your
social media team's job is to follow both influencers and news in
your industry, as well as to compile a range of content sources.

Content curation--that is, utilizing content from various outside
sources--is often part of a social media strategy. Content
curation directories and aggregators gather, organize and provide
content from a host of notable sources and sort them by theme or
topics. These sites typically republish original content and link
to the full entry, though some also provide interpretation and
commentary.

Top directories such as Alltop.com can lead you to an extensive
collection of blogs for almost any kind of topic, from numerous
reputable sources. Then there are aggregators in specific
categories, such as Inbound.org, Hacker News, and TechMeme for
the Internet marketing and technology fields.

DailyTekk.com, a technology blog, compiled a list of the top 10
social media sites for content curation:

Social media platforms also offer content opportunities such as
Twitter Stories, LinkedIn Today, and the Explorer section of
Google+ or the Google RSS feeds, which send you syndicated news
stories throughout the day. You'll need software such as Feed
Reader or News Aggregator for this or one of the many other RSS
feeds.

Current events, news stories and trends are marvelous sources of
content, and commenting on news stories that are relevant to your
industry is smart. You can easily add links for integration
across platforms. You want your customers or potential customers
to follow you everywhere, so it's crucial to present content in a
way that's specific to each platform. For example, if you run an
animal shelter and a major oil spill is the story of the day,
Tweet something about how that spill will affect wildlife. On
Facebook, you might ask people to join you on your visit to the
areas affected by the oil spill and let them know how they can
help endangered animals and ocean life. On your Pinterest board,
you might post photos from other sources, as well as your own
photos once you arrive in the affected area. Then you might go
back on Twitter to tell followers that you have new photos of how
the oil spill is affecting wildlife.